I come from a family of storytellers. Growing up, my father would make up these stories about how he and my mother met and fell in love, and my mother would tell me these elaborately visual stories of growing up as a kid in New York, and I was always so enrapt.

A man can get my attention by smiling at me and then coming over and talking to me. The best way to get a girl's attention is to start a conversation.

Create something for yourself that you feel proud of, that you are in control of, that gives you a better understanding of the type of artist you want to be.

Sometimes as human beings, we're so contradictory - we may say something or do something and completely contradict ourselves. That's what I'm learning to embrace in television - not knowing what's going to happen.

Gay marriage is absolutely something that I am in full support of and a big advocate of, and I think it's an important issue, but there's a reason that I don't talk about politics and why I'll never be in politics. I am not the person to ever do that.

To be honest, I don't listen to much music! I've been so engrossed in it my whole life that when I drive around in my car, I'll listen to college lectures on philosophy and literature and world history, things like that, to kind of catch up on the college experience I missed.

I think it's scary that that our elected officials aren't operating under the principles of human rights, under the principles that this government and this country was founded on.

Government is, by its very nature, a destroyer of liberties; the Obama administration, specifically, is promising to interfere with the economy and the health care system so profoundly that Washington will soon have us all in chains.